hubble_celebration_000425 NASA celebrated the Hubble Space Telescope's first decade in space Tuesday with glowing reminiscence at an anniversary ceremony at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.
Personally congratulating all the scientists, engineers and astronomers who have worked on Hubble, Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for Space Science, put out a special thanks to all the astronauts and personnel at Johnson for making the telescope an overwhelming success.
Astronauts on board Space Shuttle Discovery's April 25, 1990 mission placed the telescope into orbit, but within several weeks it became clear that there was a severe problem with the Hubble's primary mirror. The mirror defect would have doomed the Hubble mission, but astronauts returned to space in 1993 to install a set of corrective mirrors, which overcame the defect.
"Basically the JSC team here and the astronaut team saved astrophysics for Hubble," Weiler said. "There would be no Hubble Space Telescope today without Johnson and manned sp-- human spaceflight."
Butterfly nebula, captured by Hubble.
From its first moments in space, the telescope was plagued by problems. Weiler described the two months following its release into orbit as "a nightmare that just got worse and worse and worse."
Many of the problems were sorted out, but within the first few weeks -- for reasons few were prepared to admit -- the telescope was returning fuzzy, out-of-focus images because the mirror was ground and polished with the wrong curve.
"I don't think we could have ever justified $200 million a year to produce fuzzy images. We played tricks with computers and we all tried to convince the press that it really wasn't that bad."
"But if you spend most of your career in this program," Weiler admitted, "you knew in your heart that you weren't going to keep this thing going without a miracle."
Astronauts delivered that miracle in 1993 when they installed four nickel-size lenses in front of the telescope's cameras to correct the out-of-focus mirror.
Hubble's Eagle nebula.
That rescue mission, which featured five back-to-back spacewalks that totaled more than 35 hours, was a roaring success, and it turned Hubble from a maligned and essentially useless broken telescope into the most lauded instrument in the history of astronomy.
"From a national disgrace to a great American comeback and a symbol of national excellence," Weiler said.
Besides capturing spectacular images of distant star-forming regions, nebulas and galaxies, as well as planets within our own solar system, Hubble has given scientists a greater understanding of the history and structure of the universe.
Eskimo nebula, pictured by Hubble.
Hubble observations confirmed the existence of black holes, and it delivered strong evidence that galaxies were forming as early as 800 million to 900 million years after the Big Bang -- the cataclysmic burst that created the universe. Prior to Hubble, most scientists believed that galaxies would not have begun forming until at least 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Bang.
Joining Weiler to celebrate Hubble's anniversary were several astronauts who performed crucial work on the four Hubble space-shuttle missions, along with several mission scientists.
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